"One of our
deputies was scared pretty bad," Moore said from the Washington Parish
Sheriff's Department. "He turned on his red lights, and they came
down at his patrol car. He turned them off and they just vanished like
in a cloud."

Moore said the ships,
reported 150 miles northwest of similar sightings at Pascagoula, Miss.,
"come right down at you and then vanish above the treetops."

Moore said several
deputies were out chasing the ships and one of the men tried to take pictures.

"Our deputies
spotted five of them, and a bunch of witnesses saw them too," he said.

In another sighting
reported near Slidell, across lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, Lloyd
Mercier said he was driving home when he saw an object "approximately
15 or 20 feet in diameter and it had a streak about a foot wide straight
through the middle.

"I was driving
and I said, 'That can't be the moon, it's too large to be the moon.'

"I'd say it
was approximately 125 to 200 feet in the air and gradually it disappeared.
It took five to six minutes.

"All I could
see was a red glow. It looked like it came straight out of the water"
of Lake Pontchartrain," he said. "I've seen it tonight with my
own natural eyes. I have to believe what I see. It was no moon and it was
no balloon, and it was no ship."